5 Techniques to Improve Your Luck

We tend to think that smart people make good decisions and stupid people make bad decisions and that luck plays very little role. That is until we’re one of those smart people who has a bad outcome because of luck.

You can’t ignore luck and you really can’t plan for it. Yet much of life is the combination, to varying degrees, of skill and luck. This continuum is also what makes watching sports fun. The most talented team doesn’t always win, luck plays a role.

If you want to be a winner, you must stay keenly aware of the role luck plays in your life. When a desired outcome is brought about by luck, you must acknowledge that fact. Don’t try to tell yourself the outcome came about because you were smart. Never confuse luck with planning. If you do that, you all but guarantee that your luck, in the long run, will be bad.

When you see that luck plays a role, you’re more likely to be aware that the situation can change. You don’t expect things to continue, no that’s for the people who don’t acknowledge the role of luck because they mix up planning and luck.

The process begins when a good result occurs once or a few times. The loser studies it, ascribes it to planning, and concludes that the same planning will produce the same result in the future. And the loser loses again.

The lucky personality avoids getting trapped in that way. This isn’t to say he or she avoids taking risks. Quite the contrary, as we will see later. What it does mean is that the lucky personality, entering a situation and perceiving it to be ruled or heavily influenced by luck, deliberately stays light-footed, ready to jump this way or that as events unfold.

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Planning may be more important than luck in much of what you do. The trick is to know what kind of situation you are in at any given time. Can you rely on your own or others’ planning, or will the outcome be determined by luck?

Technique 2: Find the Fast Flow

The idea here is to be where things are happening and surround yourself with a lot of people and interactions. The theory being that if you’re a hermit, nothing will ever happen.

Eric Wachtel, a New York management consultant and executive recruiter, has watched literally hundreds of men and women climbing career ladders. In his observation, people who get dead-ended are very often people who allow themselves to become isolated.

… The worst thing you can do is withdraw from the network of friendships and acquaintanceships at home and at work. If you aren’t in the network, nobody is ever going to steer anything your way.”

People make things happen. Not necessarily friends, just contacts. But for this to happen people need to know what you’re trying to do – or where you want to go. Few things make us happier than helping others with lucky breaks.

In the words of Eric Wachtel, the consultant recruiter mentioned above: “It really is very pleasant to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, there’s a job opening that sounds as if it might be your kind of thing.’”

There are two ways to be an almost sure loser in life. One is to take goofy risks; that is, risks that are out of proportion to the rewards being sought. And the other is to take no risks at all. Lucky people characteristically avoid both extremes. They cultivate the technique of taking risks in carefully measured spoonfuls.

Here is what generally happens in life. Some person sticks their neck out and the speculation pays off. They become rich and famous. Newspapers interview the person, asking them “how can we do the same thing you did?” And the newfound sage replies not that he got lucky, no, but rather that he was smart and hard working and those sorts of things. And we eat this stuff up.

In part this is because culturally we hate the gambler. Largely because we don’t like that we can’t take risks ourselves. The gambler represents what we are not. It’s this motivated reasoning that makes it easy to find ways to dislike him.

It is essential to take risks. Examine the life of any lucky man or woman, and you are all but certain to find that he or she was willing, at some point, to take a risk. Without that willingness, hardly anything interesting is likely to happen to you.

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[T]he need to take risks extends into all areas of life. Falling in love, for instance. If you want to experience the joys of such a relationship, you must be willing to take the possible hurts, too. You must be willing to make an emotional commitment that has the capacity to wound you. But it is exactly like playing a lottery: If you don’t bet, you are not in position to win.

Risk — smart risk — is a key element to getting lucky. Going to the track and betting on the 99-1 payoff is just stupid.

Technique 4: Run Cutting

“Don’t push your luck.” My parents used to repeat that ancient maxim after I scored a 30-minute curfew extension and rather than be happy with that, I tried to push it longer.

As nearly all lucky people realize instinctively or learn through experience, runs of luck always end sooner than you wish. Sometimes they are long runs; much more often they are short. Since you can never tell in advance when a given run is going to end, the only sensible thing to do is preserve your gains by jumping off early in the game. Always assume the run is going to be short. Never try to ride a run to its very peak. Don’t push your luck.

The simplest way to illustrate this is to calculate the mathematics of probability in tossing a coin. If you toss it 1,024 times, the odds are there will be one long run in which heads comes up nine times in a row. But there will be thirty-two short runs in which heads comes up four times in a row. Which is the way to bet?

On the short runs, of course.

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Always cut runs short. Sure, there will be times when you regret doing this. A run will continue without you, and you will be left enviously watching all the happy players who stayed aboard. But statistically, such gloomy outcomes are not likely to happen often.

One problem is that long, high runs of luck make news and get talked about. If you go to a racetrack and have a so-so day, you will forget it quickly. But if you have one of those days when every horse runs for your benefit, you will undoubtedly bore your friends with the story for a long time. We hear more about big wins than about the vastly more common little wins. This can delude us into thinking the big wins are more attainable than they really are. We think: “Well, if all these stories are true, maybe there’s a big win waiting out there for me.”

Casinos publicize big wins that are usually the result of long runs of luck. They do this for two reasons. First, it’s a good story and we think that we can win more than we actually can. Second, it encourages people who are winning, to keep those bets riding so they can be one of the big winners. Of course, the odds are with the casino so the longer you play the more likely luck goes to odds. And the odds favor the house.

We never know how long luck will last but we do know that short runs of luck are much more common than long runs of luck.

As you enter any new venture – an investment, a job, a love affair – you cannot know how it will work out. No matter how carefully you lay your plans, you cannot know how those plans will be affected by the unforeseeable and uncontrollable events that we call luck. If the luck is good, then you stay with the venture and enjoy it. But what if the luck is bad? What if the bottom drops out of the stock market? Or the seemingly limitless promise of that new job vanishes in a corporate upheaval? Or your love affair sours when a rival suddenly appears?

The lucky reaction is to wait a short time and see if the problems can be fixed or will go away, and then, if the answer is no, bail out. Cut losses short. This is what lucky people habitually do. To put it another way, they have the ability to select their own luck. Hit with bad luck, they discard it, freeing themselves to seek better luck in another venture.

The inability to cut losses is one of the traits of the born loser according to psychiatrists Stanley Block and Samuel Correnti in their book Psyche, Sex, and Stocks.

Sunk costs are hard to overcome, in part because it often involves confessing that you were wrong.

It is hard because it requires a kind of pessimism, or unsentimental realism, that doesn’t come naturally to many. What makes it still harder is that there are times when, in retrospect, you wish you hadn’t applied it.

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

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